Pynchonia.

30.EPILOGUE.70: December 1, 2003.
"Pynchonia (or: People Who REALLY REALLY Matter: Thomas Pynchon)."

Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves.
                    -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.
A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words-- "events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"-- pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces.
                    -- Thomas Pynchon, V.
If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
                    -- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Of Lot 49.
YAAAGGGGHHHHH!
                    --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

        "Thomas Pynchon."
        "Thomas Pynchon?"
        "Thomas Pynchon."
        "Oh." I took a sip of coffee.
        "I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow in the early 1980s. I couldn't handle it," Brian said. "I tried to read it over and over and over again. And his other (at that time) two novels, V. and The Crying Of Lot 49. I was in highschool. I kept on trying to read them. And I never could. But for some reason I kept coming back."
        "Yeah?"
        "Yeah. And then, finally, in Grade 12 I managed to read Gravity's Rainbow over the course of 3 weeks. And it was brilliant."
        "I remember you made me read it, once, a long time ago. I couldn't get through the first 50 pages."
        "Sorry. You still should read it, though."
        "Maybe later." I leaned back in the chair.
        Brian rested his elbows on the table.
        "Anyway, when I finally got through Gravity's Rainbow in 1987," he said, "it finally dawned on my primitive brain that Thomas Pynchon is one of the greatest living American novelists, if not maybe the greatest living American novelist. If not just plain one of the best writers ever."
        I took another sip of coffee. For some reason I felt like we hadn't been here for what seemed to be years. Even though we'd been here all along. Still, it felt good to be here, now.
        "As far as I'm concerned, Gravity's Rainbow is hands down one of the best books I have ever read. And one of the best books ever.
        "It blew me away. Totally and completely. When I finished it, the universe seemed alive and weird and glowing."
        "I would have thought you would have put Don DeLillo in the whole 'Greatest American Novelist' thing."
        Brian shrugged.
        "It's sort of touch-and-go with me," he said. "DeLillo's output is brilliant. And while Underworld's one of the best books ever written, really, it is-- But, still, DeLillo somehow seems more 'realistic' than Pynchon. And that's not always a good thing because the world really isn't like 'realistic fiction' any more. If it ever was.
        "The world is far more surreal, now. Far more like science fiction.
        "I mean, DeLillo is still amazing. Don't get me wrong. And he does have a kind of sci-fi side to him. Just not as much as Pynchon. I mean, White Noise is a great book. So is Cosmopolis and, well, Underworld, and what have you. Technically, they're all really, really good. And depending on the mood I'm in I might say it's a tie-- DeLillo and Pynchon both occupy the position of Greatest Living American Novelist. They are very, very close. But, for the purposes of this exercise I'm siding with Pynchon. Especially because of Gravity's Rainbow."
        "Why Gravity's Rainbow?"
        "It's Pynchon's 'big book.' I mean, well, Pynchon, has more than one 'big book.' V. is also pretty big, size-wise and theme-wise, and Mason & Dixon is at least as long as Gravity's Rainbow, if not maybe a little longer. But still, Gravity's Rainbow is 'bigger' than both those books. There's just more in it. It's about 800 pages long, so yeah it's physically large. But the information in it is so densly packed, it's like there's five or six books of equal or greater size coded into its pages. It's like DNA."
        "Oh."
        "But as far as the DeLillo/Pynchon thing, Pynchon is more of a philosopher, a deep thinker, than DeLillo. I mean, DeLillo also thinks a lot, and they both criticize the American Dream and analyze contemporary life. But on a very significant level, Pynchon is talking about the fabric of reality. Whereas DeLillo is more of a cultural commentator, even when he ventures into ontological or linguistic terrain. Also, Pynchon has this weird gonzo, starry-eyed quality, even when he's being extremely dark. He's just so weird and fun."
        "Okay. So you're saying Pynchon's stuff is somehow more...."
        "I don't want to say 'human,' but maybe not as distant and cold. Pynchon is sort of more like a paranoid futurist, and DeLillo is more of a hyperreal pragmatist."
        Brian sipped his coffee. Cappuccino, actually. And Heather was behind the counter, talking to friends. I watched Brian watching her.
        I felt this urge building in me. I wanted to leap across the table and throttle him. Strangle him. Beat him.
        "Anyway," he said. "Pynchon's writing is cool, very frenzied and weird, and very, very information-dense. He can be awfully tough to read. But he's worth it. And he can also be quite funny."
        "What I read of Gravity's Rainbow was kind of funny, in places," I said, trying to ignore the fact that Brian was ogling Heather. "But it was more weird than funny. And kind of strangely sad. And really kind of dark. When it wasn't boring."
        "Yeah, Pynchon's 'funny' is a different kind of 'funny.' It's more like really demented slapstick and bad puns-- which plays off all the paranoia and bleakness of his vision, as well as at the same time a kind of strange post-hippy utopianism, all combining to make his writing just kind of insane-seeming."
        "And, yeah, Gravity's Rainbow kind of felt like science fiction, too," Bob said.
        "Yeah. Like I said, a lot of his books read like science fiction. Or some kind of really weird fantasy."
        "But at the same time it all seemed kind of real, too. You're right. And simultaneously surreal. Like the fabric of reality in the book was starting to shatter."
        "That actually does happen, sort of, at the end of Gravity's Rainbow," Brian said. "Very weird. Science-fiction-y, surreal. The book's filled with data. Totally dense, I can't stress this enough. It's dense almost to the point where it's almost like the whole purpose of the writing is to pack as much stuff into a sentence as is possible. Also, a lot of his ideas seems informed by sf. And science, too. All his books have references to time travel and quantum theory and artificial intelligence as well as popular culture like comics and cartoons and obscure b-movies. And 'high' culture too: Greeks, classical philosophers, obscure Christian theology, Buddhism, mysticism, classical music, mythology, jazz, literature from all times and places, and so on. And Godzilla. Don't forget Godzilla. Pynchon likes Godzilla.
        "And the writing kind of mirrors the weirdness of contemporary life. I mean the contemporary world has, in a certain sense, become a very information-dense science fiction movie. When you have the Internet, and primitive virtual reality, and people working on nanotechnology, and others working on theories of how to literally to 'reprogram' the universe because they're starting to think of matter as raw information that can be edited-- when you've got all this stuff around you for real, you don't really need sf. All sf can offer you, now, are westerns in outer space and (in most cases) quickly dated scientific extrapolations. But someone like Pynchon knows how to use the science of today and yesterday, as well and the popular culture of different times, and the political and metaphysical philosophies, too-- and turn them all on their ears and into metaphors."
        Brian stopped talking and watched Heather walking back and forth.
        Then he started talking again:
        "Sometimes," he said, "people find this effect funny. And sometimes it is. But a lot of the time people find it 'funny' simply because it's different and doesn't jibe with what they believe to be their daily experience. This is because people tend to filter out the world around them and focus on their daily lives as a kind of bland reality. And there is more to life than the blandness of daily life. Partly because daily life just isn't that bland, if you really look at it. We're surrounded with so much science it's like magic. And I mean we're getting to a point where our very environment is becoming more and more interactive in a directly interpersonal way. And we've got all this information being thrown at us all the time."
        "Yeah, but a lot of people don't notice this," I said. "They filter it because they can't handle all the data. And then they become alienated."
        "It can be hard. I'll admit that. Partially because so much of the data we're bombarded with is so very repetitive. Like, we've seen and heard so much of this stuff before. And yet, a lot of it is also slightly different, even if it does more or less say stuff that's been said before. And some of it's exactly the same. And that can be disorienting because you tend to tune it out until you hit something that seems new. But then you don't know what the context of this new thing really is because when you tune out the repetitive stuff you also inevitably tune out some new stuff, too."
        "Yeah," I said. "So you never really know what you can or can't ignore. So you have to pay attention to all of it which is frustrating, or none of it-- because paying attention to only some of it just doesn't work, now."
        "Yeah. Because you never know what you're going to need. You never know what repetitions or what novel bits of data will become important. And they will become important. At least some of them, anyway. Very important."
        Brian sipped his coffee.
        "Also," he said, "the majority of people still consider the minutia of daily life in a 19th Century way. In the 19th Century the minutia of daily life consisted of things like dinner with the kids; a wife cleaning house; a man going to work at a job and what he does there and what his boss is like; slow and languid work days, even in hellish factories; looking at starving beggars. The invention of better printing presses and steam engines were in the background-- and so was the burgeoning information explosion-- but they were still just that, backgrounded. And so the personal sphere of the individual still wasn't that saturated with information and different kinds of textual interactivity. Coal was energy, and that was still tangible, a fuel you could hold, not electrical. People went down to the pub after work to complain about the government while still ultimately trusting it. Wars were slow moving wars. There was only one newspaper per city, maybe two if you were lucky. Sometimes even none. Literacy was on the rise, but still there were lots of people who didn't read, and who didn't even go to school. Life was domestic. People were starting to think, but everyone wasn't bombarded with intelligence...."
         "What do you mean 'bombarded with intelligence?' Do you mean that people are 'bombarded with intelligence' now? People are just as stupid now as they were 100 years ago."
        "Oh yeah," Brian said. "There are lots of stupid people, now. Sure. But that's partly because we are bombarded with intelligence. It's a paradox, and I don't even pretend to understand it. But ultimately, there is so much information out there, and so much of it is so incredible, and intelligent, and amazing, that people have to make an effort not to absorb it. It's easy to learn stuff on the Internet, or on tv, and there are more books now than ever before-- in fact, in many ways smarts are just dropped onto your lap every day. And the crime is that no one notices. In fact, people seem to go out of their ways not to absorb it-- which makes the stupidity double. Because all it takes is just opening your eyes to all the multiplex waves of data out there, all the amazing, contradictory, ever-proliferating, Pynchonian reams of data. All you have to do is approach the world data banks with an open mind and within a few months you'll have absorbed enough repetitive, contradictory, self-nullifying, polemical, wonderful information to totally shatter all your preconceived notions of what the universe is and can be. And that puts everything and everyone into perspective-- or rather perspectives-- and when you wrestle with that, it can only make you smarter. Life actually is more complex now than ever, but that's what's so freeing about being alive now. But people would just rather wallow in their own tunnel-vision. So, yes, we are being bombarded with intelligence. It's just that the majority of the free world refuses to notice. And that makes people even dumber now than before, because when you have no choice but to be ignorant you can't really be faulted for being ignorant-- but when you have the choice to break away from ignorance, and you choose not to, that's even worse."
        Brian stopped. I didn't know what to think about this little data-dump. Although it did seem kind of familiar. Brian looked at me like I was looking at him like he was insane.
        "Anyway," he said, "back to Pynchon."
        "Sure," I said.
        "Anyway, where was I?" Brian stopped for a minute. "Oh yeah. However, in the 20th Century, especially in the last half of the 20th Century-- and in the 21st, things become different. All the quaint domestic aspects of the 19th Century are still around, but something else creeps in-- tons of technology and information. This is sort of what I said above, but I'll deal with the technological aspects of it, now."
        "Okay."
        "In the contemporary age," he said, "the minutia of daily life now consist of all the 19th Century stuff plus:
        "Watching a constant stream of images on a flickering box; talking with your friend using a machine that makes it seem as if his or her voice is inside your head; playing videogames; seeing movies; going to work and compiling huge streams of data using a computer; driving in a car everywhere, flying 100 miles to work and back each day; coal as energy, but also nuclear fission, petroleum byproducts, solar power, and hydrogen; music playing constantly, making it seem as if you are the star of your own movie; being surrounded by computers-- some of which can call you by name and actually do what you say; starving beggars with laptop computers and their own webpages. Robots: robot dogs, robot cats, robots that make other robots. Global data networks. Enormous government files on each and every one of us. The daily discovery of new superdiseases coupled with the more-or-less successful containment of said diseases within short periods of time. Wars that start and stop within the blink of an eye. Cybernetic body parts. Holograms, computer chips, biochips, primitive nanotechnology, the possibility of the breaking of the light barrier, quantum computing, the mathematical 'discovery' of parallel universes. And so on.
        "And Pynchon's books elaborate upon this aspect of the minutia of the 20th / 21st Century. All the domestic stuff is there, but so is the silicon, the hyperreal, the potentialities and the information.
        "And, because of this, the more time goes on, and the more the world begins to resemble a Thomas Pynchon novel. The paranoia. The quick cuts. The information overload. The black humour. The spiritual terror. The more his viewpoint seems less like satire, and more like prophecy."
        "Right."
        "But, let's move on."
        "Moving on."
        "Pynchon's style is really complex, yet for the most part his sentences are simple."
        "How do you mean?"
        "The effect is hard to describe, you just have to see it in action in order for it to make sense. A lot of the time the writing is very easy to understand in small doses, but his command of voice makes it veer from style to style quickly. And also what he's talking about usually operates on multiple levels. Lots of references, allusions, and symbols hidden in even some of the simplest of statements. Also, Pynchon's narrators are 3rd person, but they sound like they're first person, so you get all these 3rd person viewpoints from the points of view of different characters."
        "But that's not unusual."
        "It is when it seems to change from paragraph to paragraph, or sometimes from sentence to sentence. To the point where the author's many different 'voices' seem to blend with the characters'. It's kind of like a form of controlled schizophrenia."
        "Oh."
        "And even though his books tend to be packed with huge amounts of detail. There's never any time to really casually develop anything in a mellow way. For example Gravity's Rainbow has somewhere around 300 characters."
        "Yikes."
        "Yeah, and they all add something crucial to the novel. It's not like there are any real throwaways. They all contribute in some way: social commentary, plot points, paranoid speculations, satire, whatever, that all interlock in a huge web. Or maybe more like a fractal."
        "Meaning?"
        "Meaning that each theme tends to connect to other themes, they are all complimentary-- again, there's nothing wasted even in a 700+ page book. And everything connects in either very direct or oblique ways, but when they're oblique they're still real."
        "Huh."
        "It's like a way of saying that everything is connected. And even if it isn't connected, your perceptions make it connected. And that's all that you really need to create meaning or reality."
        "Like quantum theory. The observer creates the observed state."
        "Sort of, yeah. Or like deconstruction where there's an unending chain of different meanings that blur into one another."
        "But how is this a commentary on modern life?" I said.
        "Well, to begin with, it's endlessly complex. And contemporary life is endlessly complex."
        "Is it?"
        "Yes," Brian said. "It is. The idea that life is simple is an, essentially, 19th Century concept again. Or maybe an early 20th Century concept-- but probably not. The idea that the truth is simple is a fabrication,. In as far as the truth pertains to reality it is not simple and as far as it is simple it has little to do with reality. The idea that life is simple and that truth is simple and that the real world is simple is both an extremely scientific and religious idea-- and in both cases that idea is very dogmatic and is shown again and again to be invalid. Occam's razor only works when you make it work by excluding all the stuff that disproves your worldview. The simple is also the domain of propaganda. The propagandist simplifies things so even the stupidest person can 'get the point,' and he or she does this at the exclusion of thought. It's easy to control people with simple ideas because simplicity blinds you to the truth while masquerading as the truth."
        "And so," I said, "what is the truth?"
        "Near as I can tell, it can never be nailed down. In all cases. It's radical undecidablility. And even the undecidability is case of undecidable."
        "Oh."
        "When ever you say something is true, or beleive that souenthing is true, there is always something that disproves you, that you have to ignore in order to keep your 'truth' stable. And that's why I think people have a problem reading Pynchon. This undecidability is at work in all levels of his writing, and people have a problem with that, now. Primarily because we live in a world that is again and again being shown to be more and more uncertain-- even on the levels of what it is that makes up reality-- and this frightens people into shutting down their minds and wallowing in certainty. They don't want to think about the big issues."
        "Which are?"
        "The big undecidables. The nature of reality, space, time, consciousness, and all that. Instead they just want to focus on science and politics and videogames and other midrange phenomena that make life okay but don't really advance you intellectually. And even those things are rife with their own kinds of undecidability. And I, for one, what I believe is that I'm only here for a few years, maybe 60 to 80 if I'm lucky, and so I want to actually learn about stuff and think about The Big Things. Not just shut off my brain and wallow in the mediocre, the pragmatic. But I'll also think about the pragmatic, too. Just not to the exclusion of everything else.
        "Also, like I said before, Pynchon's novels are filled with information. And contemporary life is nothing if not permeated with reams and reams of information. It's also very cinematic, and paranoid. We are all the centres of our own attention, the focus of the universe, in a way that-- before the proliferation of the star-making mass media-- never previously existed. In a sense we are all the centres of some 'Plot' or another, the stars of our own reality shows, the focal point of attention-- usually imagined by ourselves, but still significant."
        Brian sighed.
        "Also, there's the matter of pop culture. You need to know a lot about popular culture (of certain eras, at least)-- or at least be open to it-- to really get what Pynchon's on about, sometimes. And he's nicely ballanced between the two world-- the 'high' and the 'low' culture that defines us. And he's a good antidote to either the elitism of 'high culture,' or the anti-elitism-elitism of 'low culture.'"
        "What do you mean?"
        "Basicall, Pynchon is aware that both popular or so-called 'low culture,' and so-called 'high culture,' can both be slippery slopes."
        "What do you mean?"
        "Too much pop culture can trap people and make them stagnate intellectually. And too much 'high culture' can trap you in a world that has no bearing on reality."
        "I thought you liked pop culture?" I said.
        "I do," Brian said. "I love it and I couldn't live without it. And in a very real sense it's more important than so-called 'high culture' because popular culture is the culture of now-- and also, for one thing, we forget that 'high culture' was at one point the pop culture of its day. But I am also aware that pop culture-- especially since the 19th century-- has on the whole grown more and more stupid and melodramatic and simple-minded. And when people are exposed to only the increasingly stupid and melodramatic and simple-minded they also tend to become stupid and melodramatic and simpleminded.
        "And this is because, unfortunately, popular culture is (on the whole) always in the process of simplifying itself, and thus simplifying the people who consume it. This is because you have to make something people want, and in order to do that you have to make it easy. You have to lower the bar, so to speak, but then you end up in a kind of regression. This is because when you lower the bar people don't rise up to meet the bar, but instead only get about half way there, and then the urge is to lower the bar some more. And then people only get halfway up to that bar. And so on."
        "I think I see what you mean."
        "However, never forget that there is also pop culture that is just an smart as anything in 'high culture'-- if not smarter because the only reason something becomes 'high culture' is through age. Age makes everything seem deeper than it really is. And so there is pop culture that's really sophisticated-- but that stuff's sadly in the vast minority. This is because it's getting easier and easier to make culture that's accepted as good, and because of this ease, you can also get away with knowing less and less, and still produce something that seems passably intelligent-- or at least shiny and/or hip. For example, in the past, people had to be able to speak 2 or 3 languages before they were even considered to be literate, which made their art very difficult to understand (by contemporary standards), but it also allowed them access to different concepts. This is because concepts are not the same from language to language. Language makes concepts, not gives voice to them. And so, because of that their art was richer.
        "Also, people had to simply know more stuff in order to graduate from school. And this also made their art richer."
        "But people do know more things, now, than they did before," I said. "The knowledge generated by daily discovery is increasing rapidly. So, in that sense aren't we smarter? I mean, we might not know how to read The Iliad in the original Greek, but we can build telephones and send satellites into space."
        "Sure. We know more. But are we smarter? Can we think better? Even though people may not have known about some of the things we know now-- pragmatic stuff about mechanics and mid-range science and biology and cleanliness-- we still don't think as well as they did back then, I would wager. We specialize and focus on narrow aspects of knowledge at the expense of actual learning. We know more mechanics, but we're not smarter. Farmers in the Middle Ages knew what they needed to know in order to harvest their crops, and nothing more. These days, systems analysts know what they need to know in order to analyze systems, and nothing more. The type of knowledge has complexified, but the actual thinking, the ability to sift through and analyze the culture-- the stuff that is not explicitly job-related-- has not increased."
        "So, technically we haven't changed."
        "No. Actually, the situation is worse. Because, the quality of thinking should increase. Because more information being inputted should be generating smarter and smarter people who know more and can think better.   But if you look at the newer generations, the majority of them seem to know even less than our generation. They don't know anything about the classical world, and they don't know anything about what's in front of their noses. On the whole. There always will be acceptions.
        "But, I mean, I taught a class where none of the students had heard of neither Dante nor Coldplay. I used Coldplay as an example of current poetry, and got blank stares. None of them had even heard of Coldplay even when "The Scientist" was being played on the radio obsessively, and the video was on tv every time I turned it on."
        "That's kind of weird."
        "Yes, that is. And while I'm not a big fan of Coldplay, I still am aware of their existence. Even though I'm about 10 years too old to really know about them. So, when I know more about current pop culture than people just out of highschool, something is wrong. I then asked them if they knew who 50Cent was and only one of them knew."
        "I don't know what to say."
        Brian shrugged.
        "Nobody cares about music any more. Nobody cares about reading. And most people don't seem to give a crap about movies or tv. Check out a Usenet group or a Yahoo! group sometimes--you'll find lots of people have trouble remembering the plots of tv shows they've just watched, and movies-- unless they're very, very simple. No one is absorbing information."
        "Well then what are they doing?"
        "They're learning how to perform mechanical activities, they're learning to be like machines.   They're doing drugs. They're not thinking. Also, another problem is that, on the whole, we can't decode metaphor as well as we used to-- and because our language makes us, and language is metaphor, we are in a sense metaphor-- self-aware collections of connections between groups of non-literal information. We're living metaphors. And when we can't deal with metaphors on a page, this weakens our minds. Instead, we focus on the literal and the surface of things: we crunch numbers, we look for mechanical cause and effect but we don't like to think any deeper. And lots of pop culture is simply surface-level stuff now-- it deals with cause and effect-- simple plots and simple characters-- black and white scenarios. And even though there is a kind of depth there, it takes a lot of effort to get to that depth. And it is possible that maybe we create this depth out of nothing just so we don't drown in the shallow waters."
        "But we should also remember that too much 'high culture' has a similar effect.
        "You can't just exist in the world of pup culture, but, conversely, however, you can't just exist in the academic world of 'high culture,' either. That's just as much of a trap as wallowing in the 'low'. Maybe even worse. Because the world of 'high culture' has almost nothing to do with contemporary times. At least if you wallow in pop culture you should be-- in theory-- able to tread water in the real world, for a while. But a steady diet of 'high culture' cuts you off from contemporary reality almost immediately.
        "Reading tons of Chaucer does not prepare you for the world as seen on CNN. Listening to only Mahler leaves you unable to comprehend and thus makes you frightened of Nine Inch Nails.
        "And so Pynchon establihes a ballance between these two worlds. When reading Pynchon you need to open yourself up to things like Star Trek and Plotinus and quantum physics and astrology and the freemasons and the occult and mechanical engineering, and music theory and textual analysis. The brand names of cigarettes during World War II and Plastic Man comics. Urban legends and the history of the Rosicrucians and the way galaxies orbit and spin and how suns grow large and explode. Rocket design. Erotic jokes. Cartoons and cartooning, Japanese tv and movies, werewolves and harmonicas and Thelonius Monk and bottles of Coca Cola. And tv and movies and Aristotle, Aquinas and Alester Crowley and science fiction pulps. And on, and on, and on.
        "However, even if you don't know about all this various stuff-- and more-- Pynchon is still entertaining and funny, and will help you along. The information thrown at you is so dense lots and lots of it will bounce off, but eventually you'll start to absorb it. And it'll be fun. People like to forget that Pynchon is fun.
        "Also, on a pragmatic, socially-oriented level, Pynchon can help you become the type of person that should be being created by a culture of information. Unfortunately, not very many of these people are not being created by this culture and I don't really understand why."
        "Maybe it's that 'lowering of the bar' thing you talked about?"
        "Maybe. I mean, I offer a few theories, now and then, but they're just theories and so don't really hold together well. I think it's just maybe way too easy to be lazy now, and people are good at nothing if not being lazy. Myself included."
        Brian coughed.
        "One thing about Pynchon, though," he said, "is that if you're one of those people who are intimidated or offended by the the thought that there are people out there smarter than you (you know who you are), I suggest two things:
        "One, curb your ego and get over yourself because there will always be people who know more than you do.
        "And two, don't bother with Pynchon. He will scare you and offend you because, like it or not, there are people out there smarter than you and Pynchon is one of these people.
        I glared at Brian.
        "You don't need to be super-ultra smart to 'get' Pynchon," he said. "If I can do it, anywone can. But you do need to recognize that you might not be the smartest guy in the world. That there are mechanisms bigger than you. Also, that there are mechanisms out there bigger than Pynchon, too.
        "Anyway:
        "There are people who criticize Pynchon for presenting characters as flat, 2-dimensional, cardboard cutouts. But to these people I say, take a look around you. Take a look at all the people walking by that are flat, 2-dimensional, cardboard cutouts. Also, take a look at yourself. You're only deep when you make yourself be deep. Most of the time, I think, the people who criticize Pynchon's writing on the grounds of lack of character are simply lashing out because they don't want to be faced with the possibility they are just as 'flat' and '2-dimensional' as some of the people Pynchon creates. They want to believe that they are vibrant and compelling, and they don't like it when they're shown they're not.
        "Sure, Pynchon's characters don't really seem to grow and change much-- but then again, I don't really know all that many people who have actually grown and changed much in real life, either. They may pretend they've grown and changed, but deep down inside everybody I knew in highschool is basically the exact same person I knew in highschool. Personal growth is, in a large part, a myth.
        "And besides, there are tons of vivid and interesting characters in his writing. For the most part, however, they're just very briefly described because there are so many people populating Pynchon's books.
        "And, for example, primary characters like Tyrone Slothrop (Gravity's Rainbow) and Pig Bodine (V. / Gravity's Rainbow), or Oedepa Maas (The Crying Of Lot 49) are very well rendered. And the entirety of Mason & Dixon is extremely character driven. And that work is especially rife with likable, interesting, humane, 'real' people. As 'real' as anyone in fiction ever really is, anyway.
        "And this doesn't mean that people in fiction are in any way less real then people on the street. Sometimes, they're actually more real."
        "Yeah," I said, "but you're bitter."
        "And getting more bitter every day.
        "But a bit about plot:
        "Or, rather, plots. And Plots.
        "Pynchon's books overflow with plot. There is so much going on in a typical Pynchon novel that sometimes it seems as if the narrative is standing still. Huge walls of interconnected events. Blasts of multileved data.
        "And, paranoia is key.
        "Pynchon's novels are all, in some way, 'conspiracy' novels-- after a fashion. Except that unlike most conspiracy narratives the truth is never really revealed. Pynchon knows that the only way to make a paranoid plot interesting is to never fully explain the conspiracy. Because, the second you explain the conspiracy it becomes an anticlimax. You can always think of better, more frighetning conspiracies than any writer, because you personalize the Plot for yourself.
        "And so, what you get in Pynchon are possibilities and permutations. Allusions to possibilities. And so forth. In Pynchon (as in the real world) the Truth of anything can never really be revealed because eventually everyone finds themselves caught in mechanisms larger than their own devising, and also because contradictions abound. In Pynchon, there are secret societies that stretch back into the mists of time, evil corporations, sinister postal systems and mysterious couriers. Assassins, agents, spies, counterspies, mad scientists, synchronicities and coincidences, hidden messages, ghosts and aliens, councils of secret masters that rule to world... wars are fought and won and lost based on arcane blueprints drawn up in mysterious rooms... there is no clearly defined 'us' and 'them.' There's just me and them and Them. And so on. Eventually everything spirals out of control. Even the 'secret masters' often find themselves victims of things bigger than themselves-- which, in turn, of course, by implication, will find themselves at the mercy of even greater forces. And on and on. Kind of like the real world.
        "Or, maybe, all this paranoia is simply a function of human consciousness. A function of the drive we all have to make things connect. To make sense out of the void. Again, kind of like the real world.
        "Pynchon is aware that the only thing that is worse than being paranoid is being faced with the possibility that nothing is connected. Even when you're paranoid, there is still meaning. Even if it is a sinister meaning. And, if you're paranoid, you also believe that you matter. If nothing is connected, and if no one is hunting you, you don't matter. And that's scary. Even Hell is better than nothingness, because if you are in Hell you are at least worth punishing.
        "And, let's never forget, that all this intrigue is both funny and frightening. That both the absurdity of what Pynchon is saying, and the extreme seriousness of it, both play off each other, enhance each other, amplifying the madness of Pynchon's work. Because his scenarios are funny, they become more terrifying as the narratives progress. And, because they become more more and more frightening they also become funnier-- but it's a black type of funny.
        "Even though his books are all filled with silly pratfalls, goofy situations, bizarre names (Benny Profane, Herbert Stencil, Oedepa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop) that seem half like puns and just half weird. And sometimes just plain weird stuff happens in these books.
        "They're also quasi-science-fictional, like I said before. For example, near then end of it, Gravity's Rainbow begins dealing with issues of virtual reality and parallel dimensions. V. talks about artificial life. The Crying Of Lot 49 deals with entropy and quantum theory. Entropy plays a big part in Gravity's Rainbow, too. So do telepathy, communications with the dead, and other psychic weirdnesses.
        "And by quasi-science-fictional I mean Pynchon's books read like a mixture of science fiction and, well, other stuff. And they escape the biggest pitfall of science fiction which is forgetting metaphor.
        "The majority of science fiction tries to be realistic fiction about the future. It tries to be exclusively literal. This is both the fault of the fiction and the fault of the readers. Science, so science fiction (and science) keeps telling itself, deals with the 'real world,' not fabrications and constructs. It tries (so it keeps telling itself) to get at the 'truth,' and of course in the eyes of science (and sf) the truth is not metaphorical. However, both science and science fiction forget that even they are metaphors, that even their 'truths' are approximations expressed in metaphorical ways. Math, for example, is a metaphorical construction based around phenomena (for example, the idea that 1+1=2) that seems to have some mid-range validity but can never be absolutely proven. And so, math, first and foremost, exists in the realm of ideas and metaphors. The same with engineering. Engineering is largely conceptual, and then the concepts are scaled down and made into things that approximate the original ideas of the engineers. But, at its core, engineering is metaphorical. And that's because reality itself is a metaphorical construct.
        "However, because the majority of science fiction does not treat its subject matter metaphorically, the majority of science fiction readers tend to lose the ability to deal with metaphor-- despite what people like Ursula K. LeGuin say about science fiction itself being a metaphor. Actually, that's a statement most science fiction readers wouldn't even understand. They're too interested in approaching sf as a literal representation of real people doing actual things in a concrete world-- and not much else. The same can be said of fantasy.
        "Either that or both science fiction and fantasy tend to attract people who have problems with metaphor.
        "And this of course is a generalization, because I have met people who do read sf and fantasy, who do have a grasp of metaphor.
        "The shame is, both sf and fantasy genres should be the genres that generate an explosion of metaphorical reading-- sf and fantasy readers should be able to dig through metaphors, wallow in metaphors, absorbing all kinds of abstract concepts and getting smarter and smarter. But they don't. The majority of them know lots of stuff about mechanics and myth, the speed of light and dragons, but little else.
        "But Pynchon knows that when he gets science fictional what he's dealing with is a kind of pop culture surrealism-- because that's what science fiction and fantasy, at least party, at their hearts, are. And metaphor. And so his writing becomes rich with weird depth."
        I yawned. On one level, maybe this was interesting. But on another, frankly, Brian had prattled on way too long. But, no, wait, there was still more:
        "There was a thing on the radio a long time ago, Gwynne Dyer was talking about how more people are reading now than ever before, but the readers of today are operating on a far lesser level than the readers of even 50 years ago. He seemed to think this was somehow a good thing, though, because more people reading is more people reading. And, I guess he has a point. But, really, they're not reading much. They're just reading occasionally, enough to get through the day. They're not really reading more, they're just reading street signs, the occasional newspaper, and signing their names. But, if you consider one person being able to slowly read a McDonald's coupon the same as someone being able to absorb Thomas Mann in one sitting, then people are reading more. But if you think those things are different, they're not really reading more. But, given the proliferation of communication and information, why aren't people today reading more, and better, than people were 50 years ago?"
        "I don't know." I sighed.
        "It seems like even though there was less information back then, that even though the amount of info in the datasphere may have been lesser, the way people understood and worked with it was greater than the way we understand and work with our information, now. And you might say that that's fair because we have so much information, now-- but we are also supposed to be better able to negotiate and grapple with this information better than people did in the past. Basically, because there is so much information at our fingertips there is no excuse for ignorance now, while there was an excuse for ignorance in the past. There's a paradox: information trains you to think, and yet people who are surrounded by information tend not to think. Even though literacy is on the rise, people are still extremely unaware of their surroundings."
        "Didn't you say this once already?" I asked.
        Brian stopped talking for a bit. Then he started again:
        "Also, all of Pynchon's books are musicals."
        "Musicals?" I said, giving up hope. And then: "Yeah, I guess you're right. There are songs in Gravity's Rainbow."
        "There are songs in all his books. And most of the time they're crucial. In V. they're weird comic relief, same as in Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. And in Gravity's Rainbow they're totally crucial to the narrative because there are times in that book where the narrative itself bends and comes to life, and the characters begin to react directly to the metaphors that surround them. The scenarios change and internal landscapes become externalized and open for people to walk through, the allusive and non-literal becomes very literal and the characters themselves seem to become confused by this. Because they're thinking about something and suddenly they're literally in their own suddenly concrete thought-landscapes. And nowhere is this more obvious as when Gravity's Rainbow bursts into song and the people the characters around the song-points begin, every confusedly and self-awaredly singing for reasons they cannot understand. In a way, again, this is kind of like real life."
        "Uh. Okay. What exactly do you mean by that?"
        "Real life is a musical, after a fashion. Or at least life after about 1960. That's when we start getting deluged more and more with music. First it's on the radio, then it's on tv. Then we're driving along in cars with our tape decks. And now it's in malls, at home, in our cars, at school-- we walk around with MP3 players, we listen to music on the Internet, and on and on and on. Life is filled with song. We all have our own soundtracks. We may not be singing out loud, but we often have music playing in our heads. Life is a musical."
        "Huh. Y'know. That's actually kinda cool."
        "There's also, because the characters in the novels begin to interact directly with the metaphors that surround them, a sense that life is itself a text. That the world is composed of information. And that if we try, we can decode, or at least interact with and manipulate this information, and create or squeeze out an infinity of meaning. But, again, I have to stress, in large part all this stuff is being implied by writing that's largely funny. Humorous. And weird. I mean, there's a part in Gravity's Rainbow where some of the characters literally become the Fantastic Four for a little bit. And Tyrone Slothrop becomes a very frightened and deranged Plastic Man. Again, weird and funny and bizarre but also a comment on how we become our popular culture. We become the texts we create, because the world is a text we create."
        "I never got that far."
        "It's near the end, when the novel starts to self-destruct because of 'gravity.' The novel goes up and it comes down. It crashes like an overloaded computer and fragments into all sorts of strange little chapters that eventually culminate with Slothrop himself fragmenting into a billion little paranoid ghost shadows, diffusing through time and space as the narrative burns up on a reentry trajectory. It's maybe the weirdest book ever written. Even, I think, because it's not just a surreal barrage, weirder than William S. Burroughs. Burroughs' writing can be reconciled as a series of very personal fever dreams. But Gravity's Rainbow exists somewhere in between fever dream and cold, hard reality."
        "Like," I said, "real life."
        "Bingo."
        "So, when you say that you can't just rely on popular culture to be able to get much out of Pynchon, and when you say that you can't just rely on high culture to be able to get much out of Pynchon, but that you need a balance between the two, you're saying that you need a balance between the two in order to be able to really get something out of life."
        "Partly, yeah."
        "I like that."
        "It's true. If you just read John Grisham and watch J-LO films you'll get a fucked-up view of what human experience like is. Ditto if you just spend your time reading Emile Zola and listening to J. S. Bach. Also, if you don't absorb any information or art and just spend your time 'living,' just relying on your daily experiences with no input from anything else, you also get a skewed view because you don't know anything outside of your limited perceptual field. You need to be able to understand all of those things, and more, to really dig into and understand where we are, what we're doing, where we were (which is very important) and where we're going. It's all a matrix of data that stretches back into the distant past, encompasses every culture that ever was, and goes deep into the future, moving into every culture that will be.
        "And I'm not nearly at that point yet," Brian said, "but you can bet your fuckin' ass I'm working on it."
        Brian took a big swig of coffee. His coffee must've been long cold. He downed the whole cup.
        "But," he said, "the books:
        "Gravity's Rainbow (1973), like I said, takes place in World War II, has about 300 characters and deals with all manner of conspiracy, coincidence, paranoia, and connection. Primarily it's about a guy named Tyrone Slothrop, who's a lieutenant stationed in England in the middle of the blitz. Eventually it's revealed that somehow Slothrop's erections are connected to V-2 bombing sites. Every time he gets a hardon, a day or so later a V-2 lands where he experienced his erection. There are people who are after him because he seems to be either predicting where V-2s are going to land, or he's somehow controlling their mechanisms psychically-- or it's all just a big coincidence. Regardless, he caught the attention of people in power. Once Slothrop realizes what's at stake and who's chasing him (countless named, unnamed, and nameless factions) he goes into hiding. The book traces his gradual disintegration as he flees from all his pursuers and becomes a living myth, kind of a weird superhero named Rocketman. The war ends about half way through the book, but Slothrop keeps on running. Gravity's Rainbow is insane, brilliant, hilariously funny, bone crushingly dense, creepy, chilling, sad, optimistic, and apocalyptic. And very, very weird. There are psychics, generals, bombs, conspiracies, lost loves, ancient illuminated seers, desperate lovers, computers, talking lightbulbs, superheroes, car chases, hallucinations, drugs, tyrannical dictators, confused young girls, brilliant old men, lightning fetishists, zillions of narrative voices, fragmenting fragments, science fiction, fantasy, sex and death, and cold, hard realism. It's a book about World War 2 that's arguably also the very first real cyberpunk novel ever. (A few people have said that some of the drug scenes in Gravity's Rainbow make it seem dated because no one in the military would smoke marijuana and/or hash and that someone writing about that is coming from a kind of hippy/pipe-dream perspective-- well, people who say that are just pretty much clueless given that more people actually smoke pot now than did even in the 1970s, and also, people in the army always used drugs to keep from going insane, even in the 1940s and earlier. Gasp-- choke-- people didn't actually start smoking pot in the 1960s-- you mean a drug culture existed before then!? Horrors!!!) Also, you've got to want to read it, because no matter how smart you are this book is smarter than you and so it gets pretty daunting, but it's really worth it. And in these days of post-9/11 paranoia, global supercorperations, deconstruction, and information overload it seems extremely prescient.
        "So it's paranoid, political, personal, sad, lonely, angry, wacky, hilarious, and just plain weird.
        "It's got kind of a punk fuck-you attitude, and it's classy and has a heart at the same time.
        "And, I mean, also, there's a pie fight. An aerial pie fight. Gravity's Rainbow has a fucking pie fight in the sky! How awesome is that?!
        "V. (1963) is much less complex and only about half the size of GR. It deals primarily with two people, Benny Profane and Hebert Stencil. Profane simply wanders around like a slacker, while Stencil is obsessed with finding a woman he only knows as V. V. seems to be around during key times in history-- usually riots and battles and disasters, and is in some way connected to-- you guessed it-- some sort of vague conspiracy or conspiracies. She may be many people or just one woman under different aliases. Or she may be something else-- an idea, an organization of some sort, or who knows what. The reader is left to make connections. There's only about 100 or so characters in this one and it's a much easier read that Gravity's Rainbow, if not as brilliant. But it's still good.
        "The Crying Of Lot 49 (1966). It takes place in the 1960s and centres around an enigmatic conspiracy involving a secret postal system. Again, it's funny and weird. There's lots of paranoia, scientific theorizing, and weirdness. It's only around 130 pages and is very easy to get through compared to V. and Gravity's Rainbow.
        "Vineland takes place over time between the 1960s and 1980s. People unjustly hated it when it came out because it's more of a stopgap book between Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, and because of the huge gap between GR and Vineland, people were expecting another GR. But it's not. However, it's still very entertaining, and funny, and cool. It's more like Pynchon Lite. And, in fact, if almost any other writer would have written it, it would have been widly considered to be a brilliant work of art. But because it's Pynchon, people expected much, much more. And, if they didn't like it, well, it's their loss. There's a conspiracy but it's more focused on the American Government, and events more or less come together in the novel instead of fragmenting away into paranoia and entropy. It also has kind of a 'magical realism' feeling to it that's actually very refreshing and fun. And, I mean, how can you not love a novel that has an actual, bonafide Godzilla attack? Don't listen to what the detractors say. Vineland is all right.
        "Slow Learner (1984). It's a bunch of short stories. Early writing. It's an okay collection, but it's only really for someone who knows and likes Pynchon. I don't know if anyone else would get much out of it. People were into these stories when they were first published, sure, and there's even the seeds of later work in a few of them-- and an entire chapter of V.-- but compared to what came after, the stories while interesting, seem kind of pale.
        "Mason & Dixon (1997). Another sprawling book, written in a lingo that's a mixture of 18th Century language and hyperactive Thomas Pynchon cyber-rant. It's huge and fun, and brilliant. People who whine about Pynchon's characters being flat can shut the hell up, now. This one's a 'buddy book' and it's totally character driven. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the guys who made the Mason-Dixon Line in the USA are the protagonists, here. M&D traces their very first meeting, to their adventures in America, and takes the form of a story narrated years later by one Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke to his nieces and nephews, and others. It's amazing and fun. And while there's still intrigue, the paranoia is greatly minimized. It's a shame it didn't win the National Book Award, but it was up against Underworld and Cold Mountain. And I still don't get why Cold Mountain won. I would've easily accepted Underworld-- but Cold Mountain? Probably because Charles Frazier uses French dashes instead of quotation marks when the characters talk, or something. But, anyway, Mason & Dixon is maybe one of the most fun, likable books Pynchon's ever done. It's moving, and weird, has a really magical feeling-- again, more magic realism seems to be creeping into Pynchon's writing, and this is good thing-- the book just feels thoroughly wonderful."
        "Huh," I said.
        "And there are other writers, now who are starting to do the same sorts of stuff that Pynchon's doing. There's a new generation of writer that is writing in response to Pynchon-- actually, after Pynchon almost every writer in North America is writing in response to Pynchon. Either they like what he's doing and want to try to emulate him, or the use some of the techniques he plays with, or they simply hate him and the way he writes and want to do the exact opposite. And even writers who don't know who Pynchon is, they've in all likelihood been exposed to stuff they either love or hate that's been influenced in some way by Pynchon. Pynchon has influenced countless people. Some of these newer writers who wrestle with Pynchon are Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann, Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Erickson, and, well, there are lots of other, too. You might like some of them, you might not.
        "One last thing," Brian said.
        I groaned.
        "This is interesting," Brian said. "Trust me."
        "Okay." I sighed. And I let him continue. After all, this was incredibly important to him.
        "There's kind of a cult built around Pynchon."
        "Yeah?"
        "Yeah. Because he's reclusive. Even though, I guess, he doesn't really like being called a 'recluse' because it has derogatory connotations."
        "So what if he's reclusive?" I said. I realized I felt slightly more awake if I was contributing a bit. "There's lots of reclusive people."
        "But not quite like Pynchon."
        "How so?"
        "Well, there's only really maybe a handful of pictures of him, and the most famous is a yearbook photo from university in the 1950s. After V. was published he just sorta disappeared. And he was pretty damn scarce before V., too."
        "Why?"
        "No one really knows. Probably he just likes privacy. But because of the paranoid nature of his writing, people have also speculated that he might have ties to the intelligence community-- or (heh heh) an intelligence community at least. But that's just rampant speculation."
        "So some people think he's like a spy or the member of some strange secret order?"
        "Yeah. Other people think he's really a pseudonym for other writers. The most famous theory on this level is that he's the pseudonym of JD Salinger-- also a recluse. But their styles are really dissimilar and it's well-known that Salinger went into hiding just because he's a big baby and believes that his writing is too good for the public, or something. He's reportedly working on novels but not publishing them to teach us a lesson or something. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Salinger and Pynchon aren't the same people."
        "I've never really liked Salinger anyway."
        "Yeah, I mean, his books are all pretty basic. They're light fluff, really. Anyway, Pynchon."
        "Yeah, Pynchon."
        "Anyway, he's like one of the most secretive, private, reclusive people in America. When he won the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow, he hired a standup comedian to accept the prize for him and turn it into a weird comedy routine. There was also a streaker.
        "Anyway, this guy is so secretive no one really even know what his voice sounds like. He never gives interviews and only until recently no one knew where he lived. Apparently some people actually managed to track him down, but out of respect to him, they're keeping silent.
        "And, like I said, there are legends. That he used to wander around the country doing odd jobs, getting paid cash under the counter, and insisting that his friends call him by specific aliases he chose. For whatever reason.
        "Jumping out of a window in Mexico to avoid a photographer.
        "Stories about how he's really hiding out from corporations like IG Farben for 'blowing their secrets' in Gravity's Rainbow, or hiding from the 'real' 'secret masters' that form the conspiracy in V.
        "And, of course the ubiquitous stories about him being some sort of secret agent, or engineer working for the military (or some other group) on secret projects. After all, he was an engineer in University, briefly.
        "And so on.
        "(Also, as an aside, Pynchon is kind of afraid of technology-- well, not afraid but wary-- there is just too much different stuff in Pynchon's writing that contradicts any claims of technophobia. If anything, one might be able to make the argument that Pynchon is afraid of everything including technology.Ý Or that everything has both a good and a bad side-- including technology. But his books are just too in love with technology to be seen as anti-technological tracts, as some people have suggested they are.)
        "Anyway:
        "The truth behind his reclusiveness is, probably, just that he likes his privacy. And, also, that the fact that he's always so publicly invisible does make him into a weird kind of celebrity.
        "Anyway, he's pretty damn cool. And even though it look me four years of highschool to finally crack his books and read them all the way through, even those halting years where I'd go over and over the first chapters of V. or GR, barely understanding a word I read, and eventually getting so daunted I just had to give up-- even that time was utterly wonderful and magical. I knew I was into something so big and cool it went beyond words. And none of my friends ever got it. But, frankly, I don't blame them. I've always existed at my own angle.
        "And all my big writing from that time was an attempt to imitate him-- emulate someone I guess I really did and still do admire-- even though back then I'd never read more than 100 pages of any of his books. But, back then, they were still so mind-expanding. Anything could happen in those pages-- and the fact that I didn't really understand what I'd read, that just made the highschool Pynchon experience all that much more mysterious.
        "And, because I never finished a single book by him until Grade 12-- and then it was Gravity's Rainbow read with increasing, mind-bending excitement over the course of 3 weeks, until my brain felt like it was on fire-- all those unread pages were, literally, filled with infinite potential-- because I knew, based on my limited exposure to the first chapters, that literally anything could happen in these books. Especially GR. Also, I'd peeked ahead enough to get cryptic hints of the weirdness lying in wait.
        "And, maybe because I came to Pynchon on my own-- I bought a copy of GR completely at random one day at a used bookstore when I was 13-- maybe that's why I like him so much. I didn't have a university professor telling me to read him. I wasn't forcefed Pynchon for a class. I simply picked him up, was dazzled-- too dazzled in fact to even be able to finish reading the book all the way through-- utterly blown away, one winter in 1983.
        "So I came to Pynchon on my own. I read him on my own terms. Nobody made me read him. Nobody forced me. And even though I tried and failed for years, I still returned to his writing, working at it until I was able to get through GR when I was 17. And so the reason I love Pynchon so much is not out of some sort of elitism, or pseudointellectualism. Many of Pynchon's detractors say he writes books for poseurs and pseudointellectuals and people who think it's cool to read something that's 'incomprehensible' and that no one would willingly read his books-- they only read them because of some perceived cool vibe. Well, those people can go to hell. I read Pynchon when I was in my teens because I thought he was fucking awesome. I didn't know who he was, or if he was publicly 'cool' or not. I just simply thought his writing was brilliant on its own merits, and I still do. So people can read Pynchon cold, and enjoy him for himself. The majority of Pynchon's detractors are, as far as I'm concerned, just jealous and scared and lame.
        "Thomas Pynchon was one of the things that made my teen years worth living through. And now, reading his books are like hanging out with old friends."
        Heather walked up to the table.
        "What're you guys talking about?"
        "Thomas Pynchon," I said.
        "Oh," she said.
        Brian watched Heather pull up a chair and sit down, and for some reason he looked sad. Really, really sad.
        "But it's been going on for far too long," I said.
        Brian looked at me.
        "Do you want to do the honors," he said, "or should I?"
        "I'd like to," I said. "For some reason I feel like I should really do it this time."
        "Sure. I suddenly don't really feel like saying it right now, anyway. For some reason."
        And so I turned to the camera and said:
        "30."

Next: M-M=?

2004 ADDENDUM:
On January 25, 2004 Thomas Pynchon was actually on The Simpsons. Or rather, his voice was. Or, someone officially claiming to be his voice. Either Pynchon himself or some sort of representative. When we're dealing with someone was mysterious as Pynchon, does it really matter? He was drawn wearing a bag on his head. He was standing outside a house with a lit sign pointing at it. The sign read "See Thomas Pynchon's House! Famous Reclusive Author!" or words to that effect (I've forgotten and I didn't tape it because I wasn't expecting to see THAT on The Simpsons.) Pynchon was endorsing the novel Marge wrote about her fantasies with Ned Flanders. Anyway, as of January 25, 2004 The Simpsons has achieved the impossible in getting a "public"-- or anyway sort of virtual-- appearance out of Thomas Pynchon-- someone who is NEVER INTERVIEWED and etc. etc.-- and thus The Simpsons have just officially become the COOLEST GODDAMN TV SHOW IN THE WORLD EVER!!!! I'll leave the significance of the first public appearance of Pynchon being as a cartoon, on a cartoon, for you all to ponder....

Epilogue 71.
Epilogue 69.
INDEX.
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